I made a thing

Last week I finally had the electricians in for a couple of days to work on various projects here at the house. It turns out we had three days of work to do, not two, so they’ll be back later in the month to finish things up, but the big projects in the garage and shop got done — we replaced all of the older (and green, and fading) flourescent fixture with new, 5000K LED shop lights, and the shop, which was wired for 220v circuits, was redone with 110V instead, so I now have 3 20 amp 110V circuits in the shop. One will be for dust collection and a few other things like the air compressor, one will be for the main tools, which will only be used one at a time, and the third will be for random low demand stuff like chargers and my homepod, which has been relocated from the office.

Now all I need to do is start pulling gear I’ve been buying out of boxes and setting it up and plugging it in. I got a good price on a DeWalt Miter saw around christmas, and my workbench (from Rockler) has arrived, as has the dust collector (the Rockler Dust Right 750). The shop is more or less 22x22, and the garage is about the same size, a good, reasonable size for what I plan on doing.

I also spent a couple of afternoons putting together a thing in the shop over the weekend. This is a storage area for the future photo studio area I’m planning for the garage, to hold all the photo gear I used to have stuffed into my home office, and which I am finding I need to have stored so I can actually find it.

It’s not a huge project, but it involved buying casters and plywood and sawing and drilling and bolting things together. I picked up a pair of these Winsome storage boxes, flat pack units that have a small 2 shelf cabinet and 5 drawers. I’ve used their drawer boxes in my office for many years — two 5 drawer and two 7 drawer units, and they’ve nicely functional and solid and have held up well. For the garage office/studio/shop areas, I want basically everything on wheels so I can move it around easily, and the standard 2” casters most of these things use are — okay, pretty sad, and they’d fail if I stacked two of these on top of each other, which I wanted to expand the storage for the given footprint.

So I cut a base out of plywood, bolted some 4” casters to it, then bolted the two cases to it and each other. It rolls wonderfully; I ended up with five casters, with four under main cases to prevent the plywood from sagging, and a fifth under the outrigger behind to prevent tipping.

The plan is to add shelves behind it for larger items, but I need to head back to Home Depot for a few more bits of wood, but in the mean time, I can start getting stuff out of boxes and into drawers where I can find them again…

Mostly, though, it’s the first thing to come out of the new shop, which is now starting to come to life.